Ep. 268 - Cake Realizer Button

exodus

Samograj Hmm yeah, I forgot about the achievement tribute “genre.” that was happening for a while there, with achievements being references to specific things. Maybe that still goes on today? I’ve turned off all achievement notifications and with the new xbox interface I don’t even know how to find them anymore!

JJSignal

exodus I’m still doing it. When I have to make achievements, I just name them after or reference things I like. Our upcoming game’s achievements are just names of albums and songs that relate to the chapter. I hate achievements, but if I were an Achievement Liker, I’d want something that’s more than just “1000 Kills.” and I like seeing glimpses of things a team likes or references in their game. It makes it feel like something more than a task I had to do to make my gamer points go up or whatever.

穴

Gaagaagiins exactly! this is kinda what i was picturing and what it should be like tbh

esper

穴 two racing wheels is genuinely inspired thinking. get bennett back on the line,

exodus

JJSignal I try to make them a little fun but I’ll admit it’s more of an afterthought for me still.

undarlegt

In Cold Blood was an adventure game on the original Playstation where you were playing through the main character’s interrogation so if you died he would correct himself, saying something like “No, that’s not how it happened”. It became sort of silly if you were stuck on a part and repeatedly died in similar ways. It would seem like the main character just repeated ways in which he had died to the interrogator.

Gaagaagiins

undarlegt It would seem like the main character just repeated ways in which he had died to the interrogator.

Objection, your honour, the prosecution’s cross examination of my client is unacceptably aggressive, there must be some consideration for my client’s unique memory mnemonic where they make up a gruesome way they died when they forget minor circumstantial details such as whether they did a crime or not

gsk

Doesn’t the first Ubisoft Prince of Persia do pretty much exactly what Tim describes in terms of game-overs, ie the game being framed as a story being told by the prince after the fact, with him saying “no, that’s not how it went” whenever the player dies?

RE: games paying tribute to other games, Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell had a few back-and-forths, culminating in Sam Fisher’s brief moment of existential crisis in Splinter Cell Blacklist when he learns the other guy “retired” and he’s the only guy still out there sneakin’.

exodus

gsk Tim talked about that game! Did it not make it into the episode?

deepspacefine

I think the Deep Space 9 documentary is made for fans with the younger-brother chip on their shoulder about the show. There’s not a lot of explicit ds9 hate (these days at least) but between the fawning love that gets thrown at The Next Generation and a lot of people being like “i just couldn’t get into ds9,” some of us have developed a bit of a complex. The fake plot they developed was pretty bad, but the documentary is worth watching just to hear Terry Farrell tell her story of getting forced out by not-cool-guy rick berman.

And for video game homages – surprised that tokimeki memorial didn’t come up. Seems like there are a few cool ones there.

wickedcestus

The Good Life does the “Well I definitely shouldn’t do that!” style of resetting when you die during missions and I found it pretty annoying!

gsk

exodus He did talk about the series (mostly the 2008 reboot) and mentioned that he replayed all of them somewhat recently, but he brought up that narrator idea as if it’s something some game ought to do, and not something Sands of Time essentially already did back in 2002 or whenever. Listening back, I guess it’s more that he specifically wants the player-character to verbally reconsider their fatal action in the moment, rather than it being framed as them recounting their actions after the fact.

Chopemon

With reference to the Fortnite section and did Cliffy B design Fortnite: Mrs. Chopemon got me Cliffy B’s autobiography as a joke gift for Christmas and on the cover it says design consultant on Fortnite. It also doesn’t mention LawBreakers. This sounds to me like he once looked at a pitch doc, decided he didn’t want to be part of it but still wanted to put it on the cover of his book.

NoJoTo

Chopemon wait his nickname is actually ‘cliffy b?’ i thought that was a joke

Chopemon

NoJoTo Cliffy B is as real as it gets

gsk

NoJoTo no kidding, he tried to rebrand to “Dude Huge” at some point

exclamatia

A mission type sorely missed:

DavidNoo

exclamatia Question 2 was so reductive I almost had to quit living, so thanks for bringing me back with this!

esper

WARNING: there IS dogpatch footage in the youtube version of the show this week

Mnemogenic

I’ve never played Loom before, but hearing Frank describe the Correct Loom in so much detail made me really want to try it. I got the EGA version, set up that MT-32 emulation, and played through the whole thing in one sitting. What a great game!

exodus

I didn’t mention it on the show but I played the Turbografx version of Loom and couldn’t figure it out and super disliked the music! But I guess that wasn’t the good version.

captain

Maybe Tim was being facetious going on about the irony of claims that The Last of Us 2 is “too long” at 25(+) hours in the face of complaints that other much longer games aren’t long enough, but it seems clear to me that the implicit criticism in complaints about overlength is not that something is too long in and of itself, but that it is incapable of holding the player’s interest for its whole duration. The Last of Us 2 is built around not only the same amount of (interesting) content as the first game, but largely the same content (mechanics, upgrade systems, encounter types), stretched to twice the length, plus the mentioned three-hour intro. Basically I want to challenge the claim that complaints about its length are an error on the player’s part to approach it “like a book,” where the first is “like a video game”; they are both the same video game, and the second one really leans into the good faith/presumed emotional investment of the player when it throws a lot more more of the same stuff at them

2501

captain As someone with mostly lukewarm feelings on both Last of Uses my big(gest) issue with the second game was specifically that the flashback/recontextualization arc was just way, way longer than it needed to be to get the intended point across and felt distinctly like padding. Everything outside of that was fine as far as pacing, but yeah, the mechanics of that game are not deep enough and do not evolve enough over the course of each entry to sustain multiple dozens of hours. I appreciate the boldness of the game trying to make a Serious Thematic Point of getting you to a mental space by the end where you’re fatigued with it all and going “wait, there’s more of this??” by the time it funnels you into the last couple of killfests but, yeah, I do not think the game is strong enough mechanically or narratively to really back up the big shot it’s attempting in that regard (and many others).

Is there a plan for the GotY episode yet, or will it get here when it gets here? Last year’s roundup got me to play Dungeon Encounters; I’m curious to hear the panel’s thoughts on a couple ’22 big’uns and/or anything under the radar in the last year I may have missed.

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